Tom Hanks Roots for Indians, Certain Women Worth Watching

Who doesn’t love Tom Hanks? He works hard, he’s nice to everyone and he’s a Tribe fan to boot! So, we’ll forgive his newest effort and recommend that you maybe check out the movie filmmaker Kelly Reichardt brought to the Wex just last week instead.

Inferno

Good versus evil. Heaven versus hell. The first 15 minutes of Inferno versus the last 105 minutes…

Director Ron Howard’s latest Dan Brown adaptation reprises Tom Hanks as the clearly tenured Professor Robert Langdon, once again caught up in a global conspiracy that will require his knowledge of symbols, art and religious icons to solve a series of puzzles.

Langdon spends the first 15 minutes of the film recovering from a bullet wound and massive head trauma, with no memory of the last few days. He hears voices and suffers violent hallucinations plagued with visions of medieval horror. The quick cuts are unsettling, as if Jason Bourne dropped acid while watching The Omen.

And then Langdon’s memory starts to come back. That’s when the rest of the film segues from unhinged Italian horror send-up to standard thriller. (You can reliably track the dullness of the movie with the sharpness of Langdon’s puzzle skills.)

It’s not that the thriller portion of Inferno is bad. Although it is equal parts frenetic and nonsensical.

Where Inferno really misses the mark isn’t so much its tiredness as a thriller but its complete lack of relevance. Paranoid classics like Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men oozed 1970s zeitgeist.

But in 2016, at the climax of the United States election—of this election, in these times—Inferno opts to menace us with an asocial Silicon Valley businessman (played by Ben Foster) whose views on humans are just a hair to the right of some actual Silicon Valley CEOs and venture capitalists.

In a movie that, including the end credits, makes rational sense for maybe 20 minutes, the biggest unsolved mystery is how little feels at stake—and how unimaginative the film thinks about what the end of the world as we know it might look like.

Grade: D+

Certain Women

Writer/director Kelly Reichardt sees something extraordinary in the simple daily struggle of ordinary people. Her latest film, Certain Women, again observes with genuine interest the (mostly) routine choices and sacrifices that quietly shape lives.

Weaving together three separate tales, each with just a whisper of a connection to the next, she tells of the isolation and disappointments coloring the lives of certain small town women.

It isn’t simply the characters – beautifully wrought as they are by Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and Kristen Stewart – that carry these loosely braided tales. Reichardt’s eloquently captured Montana landscape, lovely but hard, both informs and reflects each of the leads.

She’s working again with regular collaborator, cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, and together they let the rugged landscape speak as loudly, or as quietly, as the cast.

Few filmmakers – if any – can create such texture in a film. Reichardt rushes nothing, letting every scene breathe, every performance matter. There’s no shorthand here, and viewers thirsting for clear-cut drama and momentum may be uncomfortable with her choices. But those familiar with her work – Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Wendy and Lucy (2008), in particular – will embrace the quiet intimacy of the portraits.

Grade: A-

Also opening in Columbus this weekend:

• AE DIL HAI MUSHKIL (NR)
• MICHAEL MOORE IN TRUMPLAND (NR)
• THE PEOPLE VS. FRITZ BAUER (R)

Reviews with help from Matt Weiner.

Read more from Hope at MADDWOLF and listen to her weekly horror movie podcast, FRIGHT CLUB.